The Connective Tissue
Before the term "ecosystem builder" became a LinkedIn cliche, Marina Kusserow was already doing the job. Not writing about it, not advising on it from a comfortable distance - actually in the room, whether that room was a Walmart Health clinic strategy session in Bentonville, an M&A negotiation at a health tech startup, or a boardroom in Menlo Park where a16z was deciding which healthcare partnerships would actually move the needle.
Today she's an Operating Partner at Andreessen Horowitz's Bio+Health team - one of the most influential funds in digital health. The title is new-ish. The work is not. Marina has spent her entire career doing exactly one thing: figuring out where healthcare innovation gets stuck and then unsticking it.
At a16z, that means building and running the firm's healthcare business development pipeline - a web of relationships across payers, providers, health systems, and large self-insured employers that most venture firms dream about and never actually construct. She is, by her own description, the connective tissue.
Walmart. The Clinic. The Chaos.
If you want to understand how Marina thinks, start at Walmart Health. She joined the retail giant's healthcare team early - back when "Walmart Health" was still an experiment, a collection of standalone clinics attached to Walmart stores trying to redefine primary care access in America. She served as Chief of Staff for the initial standalone clinical delivery team.
That job title doesn't fully capture the work. She was sourcing and deploying value-based partnerships for a business that had no playbook, no precedent, and frankly no guarantee of surviving. The Walmart Health clinics eventually closed in 2024, but the period Marina was there - when the ambition was loudest - gave her something no MBA program offers: an understanding of what happens when the world's largest employer tries to reinvent primary care at scale. What breaks. What holds. What the incumbent healthcare system will and will not bend to accommodate.
She left with that knowledge intact, which is worth more than any press release.
Unite Us: Where M&A Gets Human
From Walmart, Marina moved to Unite Us, the ICONIQ-backed social health software company whose entire thesis was that non-clinical needs - food, housing, transportation - are healthcare problems. At Unite Us, she worked on the M&A team, handling the acquisitions of Carrot Health and Nowpow.
Acquisitions at a growth-stage startup are a particular kind of test. You're integrating companies, people, and codebases while the rest of the business is still sprinting. The fact that Marina worked through two of those integrations tells you something about her tolerance for ambiguity and her ability to keep things moving in conditions where nothing is clean or linear.
Before All of That: Oxeon
Marina's career started at Oxeon Partners, a New York City-based firm that does healthcare C-suite recruiting and investing. It's a niche combination, but a revealing one to begin at: you spend your days understanding exactly what kinds of leaders healthcare organizations need, and why so many fail to find them. It's a front-row seat to the talent and leadership gaps that shape whether innovations succeed or stall.
Starting at Oxeon means Marina entered a16z already knowing the people running the systems her portfolio companies would need to navigate. That's not luck. That's sequencing.
What She Actually Does at a16z
The Bio+Health Go-To-Market Network at a16z - the infrastructure Marina helps lead alongside partners including Ginger Liau, James Watson, and Paxton Paine - is the mechanism through which a16z portfolio companies gain access to the healthcare industry's decision-makers: health system executives, payer leadership, large employers who self-insure their workforces.
In November 2022, Marina announced the partnership between the a16z Bio+Health Fund and Bassett Healthcare Network, a health system serving rural communities in New York State. The deal was designed to help Bassett leverage portfolio company technologies to address healthcare delivery challenges for populations that tech-enabled health companies rarely reach first. Rural healthcare is unglamorous, high-friction, and badly underserved. The fact that Marina's team worked to make it a priority says something about what she thinks healthcare venture capital is actually for.
She also serves on the Health Evolution Partner Committee, one of healthcare's senior leadership networks, and is part of Downeast Digital, a digital advisory group focused on economic development in Maine.
NYC + Nashville
She splits her time between New York City and Nashville. The pairing is telling. New York is where the deals happen, where the finance world and the startup ecosystem overlap, where you run into the people who run things. Nashville is where American healthcare is increasingly being built - a growing hub of health tech and health services that quietly became one of the most important cities in the industry.
Living in both is not a lifestyle choice. It's a positioning strategy.